Identify the Smiling Dog! Captcha has Gone too Far to Block Bots

Correctly identifying smiling dogs in a captcha is a near-impossible task

The depths of technology, Captcha, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, has long made the Internet incomprehensible to the average user. It is an interactive feature added to web forms to distinguish whether a human or automated agent is using the form. To log in to a website, out of nine dog pictures, you need to identify which ones were smiling as part of a captcha test. No one is sure whether dogs can smile, meaning that correctly identifying smiling dogs in a captcha is a near-impossible task. The increasingly complicated tests are the work of hCaptcha, a privacy-protecting alternative to Google's captcha system, which claims to have the Captcha run on around 15 percent of the internet.

Catcha has gone too far to block bots:

Google got into the Captcha game in 2009, buying reCAPTCHA, developed for tens of millions of dollars. Captchas often make the user experience slower and more complicated. Captcha was designed to introduce an element of friction to the web browsing experience. It appears as if captcha's dominance over the internet could be waning. The Privacy Access Token concept was developed in collaboration with Google, Cloudflare, and Fastly. The Privacy Access Token is basically just a rebranding of Privacy Pass.

Captchas often make the user experience slower and more complicated. The future of captchas is bright in large part because hCaptcha is trying to rework it from users feeling like they're doing unpaid labor for Big Tech companies to a moment of fun. This is largely because hCaptcha is trying to remake fun moments from users who feel like they are doing unpaid work for a giant tech company. hCaptcha has tested different puzzle variations that users can solve, the most popular being the animal-based one.

More Trending Stories